Tag: IaaS

Microsoft this week announced the public preview of disaster recovery for Azure IaaS virtual machines (VMs) using Azure Site Recovery (ASR). You can now easily replicate and protect IaaS based applications running on Azure to a different Azure region of your choice within a geographical cluster without deploying any additional infrastructure components or software appliances in your subscription. This new capability, along with Azure Backup for IaaS virtual machines, allows you to create a comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery strategy for all your IaaS based applications running on Azure. As you move production applications to the cloud, Azure natively provides you the high availability and reliability that your mission critical workloads need. However, compliance requirements such as ISO 27001 still require that you have a provable disaster recovery solution…

I’ve seen many posts on forums asking for more detail on the temporary disks assigned to Azure IaaS Windows and Linux VMs so here is a quick post explaining what they are. When you create a VM either in the portal or command line utilities (i.e. PowerShell) you automatically receive an additional drive or mount point which is available for you to use at no additional cost for storage or transactions. The primarily use case is to provide faster storage (IOPS and Latency) but although this sounds great it isn’t to be used for any data that you wish to keep. You typically store temporary data on these drives like Windows page files and Linux Swap files or even SQL TempDBs. As you can see from the images below it…

Have you ever wondered how to set a Static IP address on a VM in Windows Azure especially when deploying a domain controller? Well up to recently the only way of possibly achieving this was to create different virtual subnets for different groups of VMs to try and control the IP address the VM would be given from Windows Azure - I must admit this was a clunky way of doing this but was the only way recommended by Microsoft Support. Now things have just got better with the introduction of Windows Azure PowerShell 0.7.3.1 (or Later) you can now do this. By using PowerShell you can now assign a static IP to a VM that will persist with the VM, even if it's deprovisioned. The VM must be within a virtual network to have a static…